Let’s Think Safety Out There

At the urging of a friend, I watched a program on Frontline that dealt with injuries in high school football. The revelations were few; most everything they covered had been dealt with before. However, since most schools nationwide are involved in some kind of spring football, Dick and I felt that it is important to re-visit the safety issues of heat stroke and head trauma once again.

The video showed a fairly, uh, “full-figured” coach patrolling the sidelines loudly pointing out, from the safety of the sideline, his high school squad’s deficiencies in effort or character. “Forty yards”, he kept yelling, “that’s all we are asking…forty yards.” This was in Arkansas in August. The temperature was one hundred and eight degrees. I had two thoughts while watching this segment. One was that being substantially overweight on the sideline sends kids the wrong message. If we tell them that they need to be in condition in order to play football, then we are also saying that when the carrot of a season of football is no longer available, then there is no more need to be in shape. We should, instead, be promoting year-round conditioning with the message being “If you are already in good shape, then you can play football, basketball, soccer, any athletic endeavor. The emphasis is on “being in shape” rather than “getting in shape.”

The second thing that I thought of was the “Death-March” practices that Bear Bryant subjected his Texas A & M football players to in the mid-1950’s. In the middle of a record-setting drought and a heat wave that sent the temperature on the make-shift, rock and gravel-strewn football field into the high 90’s and breaking 100 a couple of times, 100 players started out and at the end of ten days only 34 were left. Now, these were lean, hard-muscled young men just in off the farm or from small towns, men who were used to hard work, bucking hay, mending fences, working in the summers day after day all day long. In the spring they worked after school and on weekends planting the crops and in the fall they worked to harvest the crops. These were tough young men. Bryant’s regimen caused young men like this to pack up and head for home, what would happen with today’s youth in similar circumstances? As the Frontline video showed, what can (and did) happen was that many young men become not stars but statistics. Withholding water in the conditions the kids faced in Arkansas would have resulted in player deaths of astronomic proportions.

After high school I played football in the Air Force in the South, in Florida’s Panhandle in the early Sixties. Since our coaches were primarily Air Force pilots as well as college graduates from schools like Georgia Tech and Ol’ Miss, they understood the need for hydration. We had a team doctor (a captain) and we had athletic trainers on duty at all times. It seemed that the trainers’ primary job was to keep the canvas ice bags full. They were duffel bag size, maybe four feet tall and constructed so that ice water could not leak or sweat out. We were encouraged to drink water as we needed it. Interestingly enough, no one, and I do mean no one, ever suffered a medical condition because of the heat even though the temperature in late August regularly climbed into the 90’s and occasionally hovered near the 100 degree mark.
The Frontline video also touched on a subject near and dear to my heart…head trauma. As I sit here typing away, I am cognizant of the fact that my football-caused brain surgery saved me (and my wife) from a probable devastating future. The laws passed in our state (Washington) make it more difficult for a kid to become a head trauma statistic. The law (called the Zachery Lystedt Law) was named after a young eighth grader who suffered a head injury in a game and was sent back in to play later in the same game. He was re-injured and suddenly collapsed. The emotional toll on his family and friends as well as on Zack himself has been a youth league football horror story.

Zack is still undergoing therapy and seems to be improving, but the old Zack Lystedt will probably never return. Therapy does help though. My short-term memory, cognition, and balance are improving every day as I near 70. If I were young, the outlook would probably be even better. And, the medical community is seemingly making new discoveries on a near-daily basis.

What can I, as a coach who has been working with eighth graders, do to keep any kid on my team from becoming a statistic? I believe that I have to take each kid through the decades in story form and outline how the football helmet transitioned from being a necessary safety tool to becoming a formidable and overused weapon. I know how it happened, because I lived it. I will then attempt to teach them to use the helmet only for protection once again…with eye-opening penalties should they fail to do so. Will it work? We gotta try. Jim Olsen